After a particularly long (but rewarding) day of prototyping and contract hunting over at Discursive Labs, Mark and I weren’t quite ready to stop creating when the work day ended. Already having his trusty iron handy, and me with my parts (and MY AXE), we decided to unwind and relax by hacking something. Typical Wednesdays right? Anyway, after reading about how the PS3 homebrew scene is blowing up, we decided to see if we could build a PS3 jailbreak device with parts we had around our workbench. After finding an old ‘atari in a joystick’ TV game we had previously stuffed into a PS1 trackball, we had the spark of an idea. Read on for photos, video, a ridiculously scatterbrained photostream, and all around good times.
As many of you know, in my personal life I’m historically quite fond of low power and embedded processor systems. It’s somewhat ironic then, that in my professional life I spend most of my time programming for supercomputing clusters, or for the development of programs for supercomputing clusters. As most of you probably also know, I started a somewhat successful consulting and software development company earlier this year. This gives me a terrific amount of freedom when outfitting (and hiring) our developer and IT personnel. “Why then”, postulated I, “should I not apply my beloved low power processors to the development process of extremely large and complex systems?” Sounds crazy? Maybe not so much. Maybe not at all.
As most of you readers probably know, I have been terribly remiss in my postings of late. That isn’t to say that I haven’t been hacking. Oh no. Bootstrapping a startup requires hacking all over the place. During the past week alone I’ve
Thanks again everyone for participating this go round. Using my trusty d-10’s, I rolled 6 dice per prize and took the resulting number modulo the number of contest entries. As you can only win 1 prize, I felt it would be unfair to do them in numeric order of hacks, so I randomized the mapping of dice rolls to hacks. I hope this provides some fairness to the distribution of prizes. The winners will be receiving an email request for their addresses officially very shortly…. but they are ….
after the jump!
*Update – Packages are shipping out now!
The polls have closed! Hackaway 2010 is officially over, and no entries that come in after now will be counted. The winners have already entered! I had entries from Thailand, Singapore, UK, Germany, Brazil, France, all over USA, Canada, Mexico and Jamaica. Perhaps many more as well! I’ll be rolling dice and boxing up the prizes tomorrow. The winners will be randomly chosen based on dice roll! I also want to thank all the people who sent in their personal stories of successful or fun hacks. It’s really reaffirming to know how many great folks are all around. A tremendous success!
It’s been a tremendous 2010 so far, and it’s time for another Hackaway! Hackaway 2010 is about to begin. This one will be even bigger and better than Hackaway 2009, and there are some really awesome hacks coming your way. Rules and prizes and a ton of images after the jump!
A pingback from Geordy Rostad alerted me to a new Z2 Ubuntu userland from mozzwald. Looks like a very solid first release, and gcc compilation support is back in (apparently its not been working since my or aliosa27’s bitbaked userlands??). Head over to mozzwald.com for the download and instructions and be sure to leave him some positive feedback. Those familiar with the previous Debian based userlands should feel right at home. Happy hacking!
Like many of you, I am throttled by the uplink speed of my network. Unfortunately, my upstream router (which also supplies my HDTV channels) is supplied by my ISP, and I do not have root access. The cable company also doesn’t release metrics for line usage, data transfer for television shows, etc. Fortunately, it uses standard ip networking over Ethernet. I ended up using a 90’s era netgear router and an old Palm V to display link statistics, throughput, etc. The connection was made using paper-clips…. more info after the break!
Being capitalists, Microsoft will shortly roll out a buyback program for downloaded Xbox Live arcade games. Games can be “returned” for 1000 Microsoft points, with the caveat that if you want to re-download the game, it will cost you full price. Corollary prediction, they will make money hand over fist. That is all.
When I read about Google’s new strategy for cloud printing, I thought “hey that’s great!, wish I could use it before 2011!”. Thankfully, I run linux on damn near everything. As I don’t have an android (which would be a pretty ideal running platform for this…), I’ve used the Z2 as my “drop in” cloud print server. Doesn’t seem like it’ll take the manufacturing companies long to integrate this into new product lines, as it’s pretty simple. Instructions and source code links below!
